No facepalms and wtf's, please.
Did you read the article?
Sounds like the ferrymen have been working without ANY increase in pay for 13 years.
THIRTEEN YEARS -- how much has the cost of living gone up since then?
It works this way on the railroads, too (under the Railway Labor Act).
When a contract "ends", the workers keep working, but their pay is "frozen" as it was at the end of the contract.
If negotiations cannot quickly result in a new contract, they could keep working for several years, with no increase in pay.
One point of interest:
On the railroad, we went for several years with no actual "raise" in the hourly/daily rate. We did receive, however, modest "cost-of-living" increases from time to time as per the "old" contract.
When the new agreement was finally settled, those cost-of-living increases were "re-claimed" by the company as part of the calculation of "back-time" due when measured against the new daily rate.
Whether or not the ferrymen got cost-of-living increases over the last decade would depend on the wording of their last agreement...